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Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

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Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#261

Post by Mikeb85 »

panarky wrote: post #112
mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

I don't understand all the vitriol. Lollipop arrived on my Nexus 5 last week, and I couldn't be happier. Battery life is significantly longer, and the new UI ... ugh, this sounds almost cloying ... the new UI makes me happy , it gives me joy . It's beautiful, it's intuitive, it's functional, it's natural. What more could you want? I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPh…

> I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPhone owners feel.

iOS is colourful and whatnot, but it's confusing as hell and has some ridiculous defaults. Ever since KitKat Android has been better by a wide margin. Not to mention, Apple sucks at services, whereas Google excels at them - and that's half the functionality of a phone these days. And Google Now is pretty much the best thing ever...

But yes, the new design of Android 5 makes me happy too - everything looks so much more vibrant, colourful, sleek and streamlined, etc... It's so much more Google-ey.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#262

Post by ToastyMallows »

mattmanser wrote: post #102
ToastyMallows wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps To be fair you can turn this off, that's the first thing I did when Chrome notified me of this "awesome" change.

Can you? Oh, thank god! Actually, now doing that, that reminds me of another two WTFs? The new menu system is bizarre. You get loads of random animations of grey appearing for no apparent reason. Put your finger on something to scroll, "grey flash!!!!". Err? What did I do? Oh, nothing... And, this could be just not getting used to it yet, but I am completely flabbergasted at just how crap the new scroll limit indicat…

It's kinda weird, does take some getting used to. I think the new buttons at the bottom (home, back, menu) are so ugly. I didn't think the needed changing, but I'm not in charge of UX, so..

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#263

Post by general_failure »

xienze wrote: post #11
TeeWEE wrote: post #2

I thinks this guy is missing the point. Google did uix research and come up with a more usable design philosophy, which makes all apps more consistent. They are now executing those grand-design rules. In the end, apps should be more familiar, and easier to use. The change itself is always frustrating, people who are used to an uix (by learning it), hate change, even if the new uix is simpler.

> Google did uix research and come up with a more usable design philosophy, which makes all apps more consistent. They are now executing those grand-design rules. That's all well and good, but they seem to do this every two years or so.

Maybe survey results are changing every two years

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#265

Post by guelo »

There was a time many years ago when google gave engineers free rein. The engineers kept coming up with new blockbuster products like gmail and maps, but the designers hated Google. They complained that the engineers shouldn't be designing the products, that the interfaces were ugly and cluttered. Cluttered because they exposed ways to manipulate all the features that the engineers had created.

So Google hired tons of designers to fix this, and gave them high level positions to make product decisions. The designers now run the company so we get new paint on the old products. The innovation is only on new designs and interactions.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#266

Post by privong »

exelius wrote: post #218
privong wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things may be all true, but are unrelated to the point I was responding to, which was your invoking the "if you are not paying for it, you are the customer" meme.

Google was the entire inspiration for the meme. Per Google's 10-K [1], they had revenues of $50 billion on ad sales in 2013, and $5 billion in revenue on everything else . If there is a conflict between advertiser interests and end-user interests, the advertiser will win because Google gets >90% of their revenue from advertising. If you don't pay for advertising, then you're not Google's real customer. They will do w…

I know Google was the inspiration for the meme.

I think we are just interpreting "for" differently, in "the UI design is for the customers". I was assuming a very literal interpration, and saying that UI design is to attract more users, while it seems you meant it in the sense that the end goal of the UI design is for Google to serve more ads. I thnk both are true, and it depends on how "for" is interpreted.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#267

Post by nitrogen »

collyw wrote: post #195
_blob wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The month view is not gone ("three dot" menu on the right side -> Month) and you can easily untick `Events` per account to hide them. The gmail app still allows you to use a list to select different accounts (tap on the account name).

Three dots. Obvious it is a menu (sarcasm). I have just realized in the last month or so that three stacked bars is a menu (bootstrap style). I am sure those have been around for a while now.

So-called hamburger menus. New Relic has oh so helpfully moved everything useful into a hamburger menu it took ages to find (it even turns into a picture of a hamburger bun when you hover), while useless trivial distinctions get giant, labeled dropdown menus. The affordances are all backward. But I bet everybody clicking around looking for the features they used to use showed more "engagement" with the site, right?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#268

Post by tracker1 »

prapam2 wrote: post #142
PuffinBlue wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Some more venting... Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events…

I like the new keyboard. I feel like my typing mistakes have been reduced. Earlier i felt like i need to be precise on clicking the buttons now without boundary i don't need to. I like everything about the new UI except for that Gmail profile switching. But you can easily switch from menu so no problem. Now OS X Yosemite those changes are annoying me and also slowing down my macbook pro. I had to disable few settings…

I think the account switching in gmail is the single most annoying issue I've come across in lollipop. Most of the other changes are a matter of taste, the account switching in gmail is just plain bad. I have 5 accounts and can't even see all the "icon" versions at the same time... make the dropdown more distinctive and nuke the icons imho. I feel much the same about the icons in the message list too.

I wouldn't mind if the desktop/web interface were a bit more like the tablet sized gmail though... also if gmail proper could also see my other email accounts this way since there's no proper mail client in chromeos.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#269

Post by stinky613 »

spindritf wrote: post #3

I'm rarely if ever troubled by UI changes but it took me a good moment before I figured out how to rerfresh your inbox in new Gmail. It's pretty obvious that you need to drag down when there are messages but without any (inbox zero) acting as an indicator, I went through all the options, and only picked the right move by accident. If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestur…

> If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestures may as well be magic. Maybe you're simply not supposed to refresh anything by hand any more. Maybe it's supposed to be magic.

I agree that this can be a source of frustration. On the flip side, once you're used to it as a global UI pattern you might find certain buttons or indicators to be gratuitous. Now that I'm used to a global back button on Android, I feel totally lost on iOS when I want to go back/up. I'm no longer used to looking for a specific app button for that action because I'm used to it being a system-wide feature.

I'm wondering if this will become less confusing once the lion's share of Android phones and apps are using Material Design, as MD recommends that content is refreshed either a) automatically by sync or b) via the drag-to-refresh action.[1]

[1] http://www.google.com/design/spec/patterns/swipe-to-refresh....

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#270

Post by ajcarpy2005 »

mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

You can turn off the 'feature' of having Chrome tabs appear in the Android app switcher in the Settings. I too think that for power users especially, this is a bad idea. Maybe if they just had like the 5 most recent tabs...just maybe.
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